Europe

Tomas Matza

Tomas A. Matza received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2010. His research interests extend across the subfields of sociocultural, environmental, and medical/psychological anthropology, and touch on issues of mental health, political economy, environment, and global health, and theoretical considerations of subjectivity, care, expert knowledge and power. His research to date has focused on Russia, El Salvador, and Hawai'i.  His newest project focuses on land stewardship in Hawai'i as a form of human/more-than-human care and as a practice of environmental justice in the Anthropocene.

Research Description

Tomas A. Matza’s first book, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (2018), draws on fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he explored the psychotherapy boom that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. This involved ethnographic research in psychological assistance organizations for children and adults, media analysis, and extensive interviews. The book examines how new ideas and practices of selfhood, and what he calls “precarious care," emerged alongside Russia's political and economic transformations following the collapse of the USSR. Shock Therapy describes the various political afterlives of psychotherapeutic care, which is now practiced as: a marketable commodity, a technique of biopolitical management, and a means to personal healing. These transformations in the nature of care have, in turn, turned the “self” into a site of political, economic and ethical production, providing practitioners with new forms of geographic and class mobility, but also creating new means of social differentiation among clients. 

Professor Matza’s second project engaged with critical global mental health. This work draws on fieldwork in El Salvador and focussed on an NGO’s effort to promote child wellbeing in child welfare centers. His research explored how psychological theories (in this case related to attachment), circulated in the contexts of neoliberalism, El Salvador’s postwar gang violence, and Western hemispheric security, as well as how anthropological critique can be incorporated into collaborative research. The project also explored the social life of metrics and data in the pursuit of “global health.”  He is currently working on a collaborative ethnography that explores the potential for life history to offers insights into political struggle, forms of violence, and reliance.

Professor Matza’s newest research explores care in a new context—via biocultural stewardship in Hawai‘i. The Hawaiian islands are global biodiversity hotspots whose habitats and endemic species continue to be threatened by introduced species, over-development, increasing water scarcity, and other factors. At the same time, as many in the native sovereignty movement have pointed out, Hawai‘i was illegally annexed by the United States, and thus remains a sovereign kingdom. These overlapping social, ecological, and political contestations present significant challenges when it comes to caring for land. Are there ways to do so that can promote multi-species well-being? What is “just conservation”? Who should care for the land and on whose behalf? Through a collaboration with Dr. Nicole Heller, Associate Curator of Anthropocene Studies at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and in conversation with scholars in Hawai‘i doing research on biocultural stewardship, the project aims to use collaboration, co-development, and transdisciplinary research to answer these difficult questions.

Public-Facing Engagement

Since 2022 I have been co-developing an environmental justice learning initiative with my colleague and friend, Dr. Nicole Fabricant (Towson University). This work brings together environmental justice community activists from Baltimore and the Pittsburgh region, and faculty and students from University of Pittsburgh, Towson University and other educational institutions in the context of three activities centered on environmental justice harms and community responses for repair in Southwestern Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio and South Baltimore. The larger goal of this initiative is to build cross-regional solidarities as a basis for developing community-facing collaborative projects, resources, educational materials, and even possible policy interventions.

I am a member of the Pitt Faculty Union's Communication Action Team, and am one of many working to improve working conditions for our colleagues as I see a natural link between their well-being and the quality of our students' educational experiences. 

Disciplinary Service

In my final year's role as a Councilor for the American Ethnological Society I am co-organizing with Dr. Heath Cabot the AES spring conference on the theme of "Repair." This conference is co-sponsored by APLA and will take place at Pitt from April 4-6, 2024. I have benefitted immensely from collaborations with Darlène Dubuisson, Nicole Heller, Noah Theriault, Emily Wanderer, and Gabby Yearwood.

Graduate Recruitment

As an interdisciplinary scholar myself, I welcome applications from prospective students with multidisciplinary backgrounds. I enjoy working with students who are insatiably curious; who are both rigorous and generous in their engagement with other scholarship; who are interested in contributing to a convivial departmental atmosphere through cohort building and departmental citizenship; and who are interested in linking their work to the pressing concerns of our times. Applicants interested in my mentorship should be familiar with my research and approach, although interests need not exactly mirror my own. Instead, I am best suited to mentoring students with whom there is an exciting thematic, theoretical or geographic resonance and for whom my expertise would provide a solid foundation for a PhD. Successful applications should also identify links with other faculty in the department, department thematic clusters, and other relevant university resources. Please feel free to contact me by email with questions.

Courses

Environments, Health, and Power

Graduate Seminar. The Anthropocene, a new geological designation identifying humanity’s unprecedented, massive impact on the Planet, has been a fertile area of anthropological inquiry. Concerned with giving an ethnographic grounding to the impacts of climate change, species loss, land enclosure or pollution, scholars have documented the specific ways that capitalism and colonialism continue to animate many of these harmful processes, while also prompting pressing questions about the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. How are political economic processes implicated in new forms of dispossession? What is the best way to account for the slow violence of toxic pollution? How should scholars respond to the ending of local lifeways and place-based societies? At the same time, anthropologists have also focused on mitigation efforts, adding complexity to our understanding of the politics of protection efforts, the permeabilities between human and more-than human words, and the way that the Anthropocene affords us with new imaginative capabilities. What insights does this literature offer scholars writing in responses to crises? What does it contribute to public understandings of the relationships between environments, health, and power? And what broader take-aways might there be for debates about the future of life in the Anthropocene? To explore these questions, this graduate seminar organizes anthropological and allied social theory literatures around four different themes—conservation, exploitation, contamination, and re-imagination–as relates to human/nature relationships. We aim to grapple with how power operates in and through environment at a moment when human/nature relationship have become matters of life and death. Topics include Anthropocene/Plantationocene studies, coloniality & decolonization, infrastructure and the built environment, affect, resistance, and repair.

Culture & Politics of Mental Health

Undergraduate Lecture Course. Are emotions universal, or are they culturally specific? Are talk therapies, drug regimes and diagnostic categories effective in the same ways cross-culturally? And, thinking beyond cultural diversity, how does psychological knowledge intersect with power and capital? How, for instance, are some qualities made to seem more “healthy” than others? Finally, do affective disorders carry a biological marker, or are they the result of particular ways of seeing? And what difference does that distinction make to people who provide mental healthcare, and those living under the description of disorder? At their core such questions are fundamentally anthropological, touching on topics of personhood, identity, subjectivity, medical authority and power and temporality, to name a few. This course explores these topics by exploring several ways in which anthropology has intersected with “the psychological.” Those include: studies that have sought to add anthropological depth to a psychological accounting of the human; studies that have interrogated the “psy-ences’” as a social institution enmeshed in relations of power; and studies exploring the increasing biomedicalization of mental health. The goal is to gain not only an appreciation of the rich diversity of human experience, but also a critical understanding of how our feelings and senses of wellbeing are structured by forces beyond ourselves.

Anthropology of the Anthropocene

Undergraduate Seminar. The “Anthropocene” is the name that many scholars are using to name a new epoch in the Earth’s history. The idea is that human impacts on the planet have grown to such a scale as to match other Earth system phenomena. The signs of the times include anthropogenic climate change, the impending sixth extinction (due in part of human-caused habitat loss), the disappearance of coral reefs and ocean acidification, etc. What sense can we, as concerned humans, make of this situation? And how can anthropology help us to grapple with the multiple meanings of the current age? How do the answers to these questions vary across different groups? And what are the prospects for confronting this shared challenge as a collective when responsibility for the crisis, and possibilities to survive, are often unevenly distributed? This course examines these questions from two angles: disaster and adaptation/hope. We will devote significant time to reading contemporary ethnographies from around the world. These texts demonstrate a variety of approaches and outlooks on the current planetary crisis. To prepare to engage with this material, we also devote several weeks at the start of class to read up on the history of the Anthropocene as a concept and scientific descriptor. And we also explore the question of whether the Anthropocene is a concept that means the same thing to every person.

Global Health & Humanitarianism

Undergraduate Seminar. In the face of various global crises—health inequality, refugees, violence, natural disasters—the impulse to do something is understandable; however, helping is far from straightforward. What does it mean to help? Should those receiving it be consulted? What are the politics of help? This discussion-based seminar sets out to investigate these and other questions by examining two recent trends in international assistance—humanitarianism and global health. Humanitarianism, in its contemporary form, mobilizes international sentiment, ranging from sympathy to outrage, to address a variety of crises—displaced peoples (refugees), natural disasters, genocide, hunger. The movement for Global Heath, a successor to international health aid, leverages private/public partnerships to measure and eradicate the rising “burden of disease” globally. While distinct in their practices, both of these share a vision of global responsibility, as well, generally, as a transfer of expertise and concern from the global north to the global south. The course will place these two trends in historical and critical perspective by introducing students to a careful, anthropologically-based consideration of them. It seeks to push beyond two forms of naiveté—on the one hand the idea that help is always good; on the other, that it always masks some ulterior motive. The primary aim is to promote students’ awareness of the political, socioeconomic, medical and cultural complexity of the globalization of humanitarian and health concerns, and the importance of anthropological perspectives in discussing unintended problems and pursuing solutions.

Graduate Core Course in Cultural Anthropology

Graduate Seminar. This course is an intensive, graduate-level introduction to key theoretical paradigms in Euro-American sociocultural anthropology since the late-19th century. The purpose is to provide you with an understanding of how anthropological ways of thinking have been shaped through specific debates, controversies and lines of inquiry. In the first half of the course you will see an evolving discourse on such core topics as culture, function, society, structure, comparison, objectivity, materiality, symbols and signs, agents, history, change, practice, method, politics and anthropology’s status as a social science, to name a few. And you will learn about how lines of inquiry that were formed at an earlier stage (for example kinship and social structure) return later in altered form (e.g. challenges to the category of “kinship”; interventions around gender and sexuality). Throughout the semester, partner readings will also destabilize “the canon,” calling attention to its construction, who (or what) is left out, and how the history of theory in cultural anthropology also bears the imprint of hierarchy, position and privilege. In the second half of the course we examine anthropology’s “reflexive turn”—a series of moments in which cultural critique took a more central place in the discipline. Topics covered include gender and sexuality, race, knowledge, power, difference, decolonization, ontology and posthumanism.

The Social Life of Climate Change

Undergraduate Seminar. Anthropogenic climate change is arguably the biggest challenge of the 21st century. If scientists are correct, we stand to lose whole cities due to sea-level rise, suffer food shortage due to desertification, trigger the sixth mass extinction, and endure unforeseen effects on human livelihood. What perspectives do scholars in anthropology and related fields offer on this contemporary problem—a problem that, elusively, appears on a future horizon? This course draws on emerging social science scholarship to show how an attention to the social and cultural dimensions of climate change can help us think about the causes, consequences and possible responses to the “carbon problem.” Topics covered include: the basic science of climate change; consumer culture and global inequality; climate policy as seen through the anthropology of development; living through disaster; representing slow violence; and, finally, how climate change is prompting us to rethink “the human” and “the future.” Together, these topics will offer students a robust sense of the social life of climate change, as well as a set of critical tools for thinking about this pressing contemporary problem.

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Undergraduate Lecture. Cultural anthropology is a social science that seeks to understand human diversity and social life. This course aims to introduce students to the fundamental methods, theories, and concepts of cultural anthropology. Some of the questions we explore include: How widely variable are the norms and forms of social organization? How do cultural values shape our perception of the world, our language, and our identity? How do class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity influence how we position ourselves/are positioned in the world? How does the mass media shape conceptions of family and community? Finally, how should we understand cultural difference in a rapidly changing world? In exploring these questions this course will seek to demonstrate the usefulness, but also complexity, of the concept of culture and related anthropological modes of observation and interpretation. Readings, lectures, and activities draw on case studies from a variety of settings – both familiar and distant – in order to examine sources of commonality and difference between human groups. By the end of the course you can expect to have a solid understanding of the history of cultural anthropology, its central topics and approaches, and a sense of new and exciting areas of ethnographic research. Finally, you will see the ways in which cultural anthropology is a productively reflexive field, in constant conversation with its past and the politics of representing others.

Anthropology of Latin America

Undergraduate Seminar. Latin America is vast, covering 7.4 million square miles of territory, and includes 33 countries, nearly 450 languages, and diverse histories. Counting it as one entity is challenging. Nonetheless, a range of historical processes, experiences, cultural orientations and trajectories link together this diversity. Colonialism, indigenous dispossession, slavery, post-colonial nationalisms, indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and navigating neoimperialism are just a few such shared histories. In this course we explore a range of processes that cut across the region, tying “Latin America” to other transnational and global processes. Topics explored include neoliberalism, development and democracy; extraction and indigenous dispossession; legacies of war, violence and security; novel racial formations; migration patterns; and alternative knowledge and healing systems. Students can expect to gain broad knowledge of the region, an understanding of the ways in which Latin America has globalized over the last centuries, and what that has meant for its diverse peoples.

Precarity and Affect

Graduate Seminar. Precarity, as primarily used in European social movements and taken up elsewhere, references a shift in the conditions of late-stage capitalism towards more flexible, irregular, and casual labor. This shift has been accompanied by a turn towards affective labor: capitalism that draws upon and produces/commodifies affect. This course explores the two concepts of precarity and affect in terms of their intersection, overlap, and interface: How is affect experienced and produced under conditions of global capitalism and expanding inequity, risk, and insecurity in social living around the world?  We look here at: affect under precarious conditions of labor and life; how affect gets managed and extracted by post-socialist/neoliberal economies; and the commodification of affect but also activism and solidarity generated by an affect of hope or outrage over (shared) precarity. The course will tack between theoretical and ethnographic studies of the two concepts, considering their utility, how they can be expanded in other directions, and what an anthropological approach does, or could, lend to these topics. How does one do an ethnography of affect/precarity? What might a theoretics or politics or ethics of precarity/affect entail? What does anthropology illuminate about the affective landscapes of contemporary precarious existence?

Everyday Life After Socialism

Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar. When everyday life as one knows it is disrupted, how does one survive? This course explores this broad question through the prism of the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse and re-composition as Russia. Taking as a point of departure “the everyday,” the course will explore the ordinary intimacies, pleasures, and also forms of violence and exclusion that have proliferated throughout Russia as people have sought to survive the turmoil of the 1990s and 2000s. We focus on the themes of art and/of death, gods, food & rest, life’s infrastructures, home and homelessness, and belonging. The course’s aim is to consider the everyday not as a site mundane existence, but rather as a locus of social and cultural vitality, as well as political contestation.

Fieldwork Methods

Undergraduate Seminar. This course has two objectives: to explore what is—and how to do—ethnography, and to engage some of the central debates and discussions about ethnographic method in anthropology. Over the course of the semester you will conduct research that culminates in an ethnography of some aspect of social life; at the same time, the course readings will prompt deeper reflection on, and perhaps even trouble, that research. The tension between these two objectives is an important aspect of the course. Beyond being just a methods class, this course will challenge you to think about epistemology—that is what we know, how we know it, and how we gather information to constitute knowledge. Thus, students will be asked to consider in practice and also as a conceptual operation how to transform gossip, field notes, impressions, documents, interviews, emotions, personal experiences, entanglement, dislike and love into ethnography.

Andrew J. Strathern

Andrew Strathern received his Ph.D from Cambridge University and is an internationally recognized scholar and social anthropologist with a wide range of interests, including the analysis of political and economic systems, kinship theories, social change, religion and ritual, symbolism, ethnicity, legal anthropology, conflict and violence, the anthropology of the body, and the cross-cultural study of medical systems.

He has carried out long-term fieldwork in the Pacific (especially Papua New Guinea), Asia (especially Taiwan), and Europe (with a focus on Ireland and Scotland) and continues an active research and publication program in these global arenas as well as others. He also conducts research in and teaches on contemporary anthropological theory, linguistic anthropology, and linguistic and social issues in Europe and globally.

For many years he has collaborated with Dr. Pamela J.Stewart pamjan@pitt.edu and they have published widely on their findings. They are frequently invited international lecturers, discussing their current theoretical perspectives. Several of Strathern and Stewart’s recently published books are “Peace-Making and the Imagination” (Strathern and Stewart, 2011); “Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion” (Stewart and Strathern, 2014); and “Working in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World” (Stewart and Strathern, 2014).  Their research work in the Pacific, Asia, and Europe feeds into their Disaster Anthropology project on global climatic change, natural disasters, and human-produced disasters.  They are experts in Ritual Studies; Peace and Conflict Studies; Healing and the Body; and they have developed the Pitt in the Pacific Program with the University of Pittsburgh’s Study Abroad Office.  They work with Material Culture and conduct museum studies around the world.

Research Description

Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart are a husband and wife research team who have published over 50 books and hundreds of articles on their fieldwork. They have been conducting research (fieldwork and archival work) in Europe for over two decades, focusing on work in Scotland, Ireland, and on the European Union. Their work has included aspects of the study of Scots as a minority language and its Ulster-Scots variant within County Donegal, Republic of Ireland, and in Northern Ireland, and also cross-border relations between the Republic and Northern Ireland as well as issues of devolution within the United Kingdom. They have also been working on Scottish Diaspora Studies, relating to Western Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. A further dimension of their work relates to Heritage Studies in general and the contesting contexts in which the idea of heritage is deployed.  They are the co-editors of the "European Anthropology" Series.  They have also published many books and articles on their fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Ireland and Scotland.

They are the Co-editors of Journal of Ritual Studies (also see the Journal's Facebook Page!), the Ritual Studies Monograph Series  and the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology and the European Anthropology Series with Carolina Academic Press. They Co-Edit the Series Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific for Routledge Publishing and the Series The Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology for Palgrave Publishing. More about Research can be found on our Personal Website

Personhood in Melanesia

Arrow talk (el ik) is a genre of political oratory among the Melpa-speaking people of Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. It is practiced at the end of political events to express how history has crystallized into a state of transactional play between participants in the exchanges that constitute the event, including the sense of the event as a transition between other events and any suggestions of contradictions involved in these transactions.

Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart
2000 Arrow Talk: Transaction, Transition, and Contradiction in New Guinea Highlands History. Kent State University Press, p.1.

A whole genre of vampire films designed for viewing by people in Europe and America taps into the same concerns as are exhibited in African contexts today. In general, these phenomena force us to recognize the final demise of the myth that modernity is based on the "triumph of rationality" in human affairs. Witchcraft ideas are themselves rational if we view them as logics of explanation. At the same time, they draw their power from fantasies of guilt and desire that arise from sources that could be labeled as "irrational."

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern
2003 Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip. Cambridge University Press, pp. 91-2.

Each narrator tends to have an overall way of achieving a presentation of self corresponding to what Caroline Barros (1998) has called the "autobiographical persona." Like personhood, persona is the overall self-characterization that the narrator is attempting to project through the narrative process.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern
2000 Introduction. In Identity Work: Constructing Pacific Lives,edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. University of Pittsburgh Press, p. 5.

The min (spirit) comes directly from the ancestors, entering into the body during gestation, while noman (mind) develops after birth through the socializing influences of kin and primarily through the ability to speak. The person is therefore a complex amalgam of substances and influence.

Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart
1998 Melpa and Nuer ideas of life and death: the rebirth of a comparison. In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by M. Lambek and A. Strathern, Cambridge University, p. 236.

Pigs lined up and tethered to stakes for a compensation payment, Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, 1998. The occasion brought people from two different language groups together, since a killing had taken place between the Hagen and the Enga peoples, threatening the peace in the town of Mount Hagen itself, where immigrants from Enga live along with Hageners.

Round sweet potato beds in gardens at high altitude on the south road from Mt. Hagen to Tambul, Papua New Guinea, 1998. The sweet potato has been of prime importance in the social evolution of societies in the Highland region.

Large house built on stilts amid secondary regrowth in Hagu settlement among the Duna speakers of the Aluni Valley, Papua New Guinea, 1999. This house was being built for a young pastor of the Baptist church who is from the settlement, and its design reflects the status accorded to this new category of ritual leader.

Taiwan, Politics of Ritual

Two statues of the Deity Mazu sit in the midst of worshipers and tables covered with offerings to honor the Deity on the celebration of her birthday. Kuantu temple in Taipei, Taiwan, 2002.

In "the Mazu [Female Daoist Deity] complex in Taiwan...Mazu is seen as having great power over matters such as fertility and rain, and temples to her are ranked in terms of their putative founding dates and their consequent privileges of precedence in relation to one another...This relationship of precedence is marked by troupes of performers carrying statues of Mazu back to temples from which their own temple or its image originated, in order to renew their power and to show the performers' respect to the founding temples.

Worshiper burning incense at the Kuantu temple in Taipei, Taiwan on the celebration of Mazu's birth date.

Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart
2003 Divisions of power: rituals in time and space among the Hagen and Duna peoples, Papua New Guinea. Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 1(1)51-76.

Dr. Pamela J. Stewart stands next to a resting dragon puppet that has just completed a dragon dance through the control of a local temple worship performance troupe. The location is the Kuantu temple, Taipei, Taiwan, 2002. The celebration was to mark the birthday of the Deity Mazu.

Prof. Andrew Strathern (A.W. Mellon Professor of Anthropology, U. of Pittsburgh) stands next to a newly constructed, privately funded, temple dedicated to the Earth God. He holds a fruit that a local worshiper shared with him after the worshiper prayed to the Deity at this temple, 2002. This temple is near to the Institute of Ethnology, where Prof. Strathern and Dr. Stewart are affiliated when they work in Taiwan. Through the Institute of Ethnology they are also studying aspects of historical change, cultural revival movements, and conversion to Christianity among the indigenous Austronesian speaking peoples of Taiwan with special reference to the Paiwan area.

Curing and Healing

In the past, after a corpse had been exposed for the requisite number of days on a platform, the remains (bones) of the corpse would be removed and placed in a cave which would serve as the burial vault and permanent repository for them. This site was considered to be the home for the spirit, tini, of the dead person and had to be taken care of by the kin of the deceased.

Strathern, Andrew and Pamela Stewart
2010 (2nd ed.) Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective. Carolina Academic Press, p. 50.

Female mourner among the Ndika people near Mount Hagen, early 1970s. Her hair, face, and body are plastered with white mourning clay, and she carries a cordyline switch. Earth paints are used to mark the body in particular ways (for healing, grief, or celebration, for example), and act to produce a kind of second skin on the person that intimately connects the human body to the ground.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern, with contributions by Ien Courtens and Dianne van Oosterhout.
2001 Humors and Substances. Ideas of the Body in New Guinea. Bergin and Garvey, Westport.

Europe: Ethnicity, Language, and Identity

Violence: Theory and Ethnography explores the meanings and contexts in which violent actions occur. The authors develop further the concept of ‘the triangle of violence’ - the idea that violence is marked by the triangle between performers, victims, and witnesses – and the proposition that violence is also marked by contests regarding its legitimacy as a social act. Adopting an approach which looks at the negotiated and contingent nature of violent behavior, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern stress the powerful unacknowledged associations between ideas of revenge and concepts of justice. These theoretical perspectives are applied to in-depth case studies from Rwanda-Urundi, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland. The authors also draw on extensive field experience in Papua New Guinea, using ethnographic detail to address broader issues of considerable global importance.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern
2002 Violence: Theory and Ethnography. New York and London: Continuum Publishing for Athlone Press.

Scots influence and traditions show clearly in these kilted and bagpipe playing marchers at the Orange Order parade, Rossnowlagh, south-west County Donegal, 5 July 2003. The Rossnowlagh marches are known for being peaceful. Near the center of this group one man holds up a huge Lambeg drum, which he is playing.

Strathern, Andrews, Pamela J. Stewart, and Neil Whitehead (eds.)
2006 Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.

Minorities and Memories: Survivals and Extinctions in Scotland and Western Europe explores historical expressions of identity in Scotland, based on fieldwork in the Lowlands of Scotland carried out during 1996-2000, mostly in the County of Ayrshire but including materials from all over Scotland. Particular chapters consider Wales and Northern Ireland (where the authors have also conducted research subsequently as well as in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland) in comparison to Scotland. The book continuously weaves together historical narrative with anthropological reflections and analyses, examining the issue of identities through the perspective of both disciplines. The St. Andrew’s flag or Saltire is a mark of the longstanding sense of national identity in Scotland.

Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart
2001 Minorities and Memories: Survivals and Extinctions in Scotland and Western Europe. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.

Courses

Ritual: Theories and Cases

This course will examine the broad range of theories on the topic of ritual, an arena of discussion which has long been central to anthropological analysis and has acquired further significance through its overlaps with psychology, history, cognitive studies, and religious studies. The course will utilize selections from the extensive literature on the topic, both historical and contemporary, and will be enhanced by use of audio-visual materials for discussion. Students will be encouraged to bring forward their own themes for discussion throughout the course. The course will be open to students from Anthropology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, and related disciplines. This course will be offered on a regular basis in Spring Term.

Contemporary Anthropological Theory

In the last twenty five years, significant theoretical shifts have occurred within cultural anthropology, leading to and beyond the so-called post-modernist approaches. There was first a decline of encompassing "grand theories," followed by a stress on local forms of knowledge and practice as the object of our investigations. Later there have been a series of attempts at reconstructive theorizing either generally or in specific arenas, for example, in political anthropology and in historical anthropology. This course will explore medical anthropology, cognition and culture, the anthropology of religion, gender and modernity, ecology and development studies, globalization, political economy, and practice theory, including theories of violence and assist students critically to evaluate some of these trends. Attention will be paid to current issues of globalization and the creation or assertion of new forms of identity, local and transnational, in geopolitical contexts; as well as to reconstructive theories in general, for example in the sphere of religion and ritual, and studies of “development” and NGOs, environmental issues and disaster studies, and theories in the area of economic anthropology and neo-liberalism, as well as classic exchange theory and ecology. Prerequisites: This course is for 2nd or 3rd year Anthropology graduate students and others interested.

Linguistics Core Course

Language, evolution, and prehistory, world languages. Survey of phonology and phonemics, morphemics, syntax, writing systems and spelling, ethnosemantics, and sociolinguistics. Language and culture, language and power, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, ethnoscience, ethnography of communication, and linguistic pragmatics and meta-pragmatic approaches. Oral history and Oral genres, including poetry and song in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. Language and movements for indigeneity and nationalism. Language studies and Cultural Anthropology including structuralism, the significance of literacy, cognition and culture, kinship studies, Pidgins and Creoles, Lallans and Ulster-Scots, the politics of minority languages.

Medical Anthropology 2

This course offers a survey of selected topics in contemporary medical anthropology. Topics to be covered may include cross-cultural and biocultural approaches to the study of sickness and healing, critical approaches to the study of biomedicine, interpretive approaches to ethnomedical systems, meaning-centered approaches to understanding the experience of suffering and pain, and the social construction of illness and healing. Special topics investigated include the anthropology of the body and sexuality, and physician-patient communication. Other topics can be added in accordance with student interests.

Human Ecology

This course examines human ecological relations within the environment, paying special attention to the vital contemporary issues surrounding global climate change and its specific manifestations in local ethnographic cases, the vulnerability and precarity that is implicated by it, and in particular how environmental disasters are increasingly being generated and test the resilience and creativity of the populations that experience them, including all life-forms and the landscapes they create and depend on for their life processes.

Kinship and the Family

Kinship in all its historical and contemporary manifestations is a central and enduring topic in the social sciences, ranging from the formal studies of different kinship systems to the intersection of changing gender relations and the construction of ideas of personhood and identity in the post-industrial world. Kinship ties run through all arenas of human life, including politics, economics, and religion, and are vital to the processes of cultural transmission and radical changes in cultural adaptations.

Myth, Symbol and Ritual

Mythology and its symbolism and ritual enactments are vital parts of the lives of many peoples and enter into the struggles of indigenous populations around the world as they seek to recreate the relationship with the environment. Myth remains an important part of religious practices. In addition, myth appears in changing guises in the creation of national and transnational identities in contemporary global society, and mythical sensibilities rest on the human capacity to create and deploy symbols. This course covers and provides insights into the aesthetics and the generative capacity of symbols and how they emerge into mythological and ritual syndromes.

Pacific Cultures

Pacific cultures present us with a fascinating picture of variability and adaptive variation in different parts of the vast area of Oceania. Taking into account long-term patterns of change from archaeological records and the work of comparative linguists, and utilizing a rich range of materials from media sources, this course provides a unique conspectus of insights, drawing on long-term field research, and aims to portray also the charm of these vibrant cultures and their contemporary struggles with problems of modernization and ecological challenges.

Bryan K. Hanks

Bryan Hanks (Ph.D., University of Cambridge 2003) is an archaeologist whose research interests have focused on the development of late prehistoric societies in Europe and the Eurasian steppes. He has been engaged in collaborative field research in Russia since 1998 and has directed research projects in the southeastern Ural Mountains region of Russia and most recently in southeastern Europe in the Republic of Serbia. The projects in Russia have focused on the subsistence strategies of Iron and Bronze Age mobile pastoralists, craft production related to copper mining and metallurgy, and geophysical and geochemical study of households and settlement patterning. In Europe, he has been working with colleagues to document the appearance and growth of early Neolithic agrarian villages and the construction of early enclosures and fortifications. Since 2014, he has been working annually with the US Forest Service on the study of Native American Pit House villages along the Salmon River and its tributaries in the state of Idaho. He is committed to providing opportunities for student field training and in addition to including students in international projects he routinely offers, in collaboration with Dr. Marc Bermann, opportunities for field training in geophysics surveys in the Pittsburgh region.

 

 

Research Description

Prehistoric Pit House Village Patterning along the Salmon River and its Tributaries, Idaho

This project focuses on the study of pit house villages occupied over the last 4000 years in central Idaho. The villages are located within the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, which is the largest designated wilderness in the lower 48 states encompassing over two million acres.  Collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service is focusing on the use of geophysical and geochemical surveys to examine the spatial extent of these sites and to explore near surface and subsurface cultural deposits. This research will contribute to the long-term management and protection of these important cultural heritage resources. Project Partners: Dr. Tim Canaday (United States Forest Service, Idaho), Dr. Rosemary Capo (University of Pittsburgh, Department of Geology and Environmental Science), Sarah Montag (BPhil candidate, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Anthropology) and Petra Basar, MA (graduate program, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Anthropology).  

Village Growth, Demographic Trends, and Craft Specialization among Neolithic Vinča Culture Communities in Southeastern Europe (5400 - 4600 BCE)

This project focuses on the emergence of early agro-pastoralist communities and related developments in craft specialization, including early stages of metallurgy, village growth and demography, and evidence of enclosure and fortification. Research to date has been conducted at several Middle-Late Neolithic settlements and has integrated geophysical and geochemical site surveys, pedestrian survey and artifact collection, and targeted soil coring and excavation. Project Partners: Dr. Miroslav Kočić (Balkanological Institute, Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences), Dr. Dušan Borić  (Columbia University, UK); Dr. Dusko Slijivar (National Museum of Belgrade, Serbia), Dr. Slaviša Perić (Serbian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Archaeology) and Marija Simonović, MA and Dr. Marko Grković (Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, Serbia).

Middle to Late Bronze Age Social and Technological Change in the Southeastern Ural Mountains Region of Russia (2100-1500 BCE)

This program of research has examined settlement patterning, the scale and nature of copper metallurgy, and socio-economic organization as practiced by Bronze Age communities who inhabited the central Russian steppes from the Middle to Late Bronze Age phases (2100 to 1500 BCE). Field research has focused on micro-regional study of the Bronze Age Sintashta culture settlements of Stepnoye and Ust’ye and has employed: 1) geophysical and geochemical survey, 2) targeted small-scale excavation, 3) additional site catchment study and 4) analysis of archaeometallurgical materials and associated features. The field research component of this project has finished and the team is in the process of final data analysis and publication. Project partners: Dr. Roger Doonan (University of Sheffield, UK), Dr. Derek Pitman (University of Bournemouth, UK), Dr. Dimitri Zdanovich (Chelyabinsk State University, Russia), Dr. Elena Kupriyanova (Chelyabinsk State University, Russia) and Dr. Nikolai Vinogradov (Chelyabinsk State Pedagogical University).

Bioarchaeological Study of Bronze Age Health, Diet and Demography in the Southeastern Ural Mountains of Russia (2100-1500 BCE)

This project has focused on the study of human remains recovered previously by Dr. Andrei Epimakhov at the Kamennyi Ambar 5 Bronze Age cemetery in Russia. We have conducted detailed study of the human remains including isotopic analysis for dietary trends and aDNA analysis.  This project has now completed and we are in the process of final data analysis and publication. Project Partners: Dr. Margaret Judd (University of Pittsburgh); Dr. Andrei Epimakhov (Southern Ural State University, Russia); Dr. Dmitri Razhev (Institute of History and Archaeology, Russia); Dr. Alicia Ventresca Miller (University of Michigan) and Dr. David Reich (Reich Laboratory for aDNA).

Courses

Archaeology of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia

This course provides an overview of the key prehistoric and early historic developments that occurred in the territories of the former Soviet Union. This investigation will include: early evidence of animal and plant domestication in the Neolithic, the emergence of Indo-European languages, innovations in metallurgy and the rise of complex societies in the Bronze and Iron Age periods, and the impact of early ‘nomadic’ societies and empires.   The course will cover a vast period, stretching from the earliest occupation evidence in the Paleolithic to the Mongol Empire of the 13th century AD. The primary focus of the course will be on evaluating the main lines of archaeological evidence to interpret and understand the key cultural, economic, technological and ideological developments noted above.  However, the course also will investigate the substantial role that the discipline of archaeology and interpretations of the past have played in the larger socio-political dynamics of the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods.  Therefore, this course will appeal to a broad range of students interested in comparative studies of Old World archaeology as well as cultural and historical studies of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Union.

The Archaeologist Looks at Death

The aim of this course is to provide students with an understanding of how archaeologists investigate, analyze and interpret human remains from archaeological contexts. While the focus will be primarily on prehistoric case studies, the course will also look at the rapidly developing area of forensic archaeology in the contemporary world.  Therefore, the course will be divided into two main parts. The first half will focus on presenting some of the main elements inherent in the bioarchaeological analysis of human remains and the types of specific information that can be gained about the past lives of individuals and their place within societies. The second half of the course will focus more on how archaeologists construct interpretations relating to mortuary practices and rituals, attitudes about the afterlife, and principles of social organization and structure within past societies. 

Prehistoric Foundations of European Civilization

This course surveys European prehistory from the earliest human occupation of Europe until the Roman conquest. Geographical coverage will include Western, Central and Eastern Europe and southern areas including parts of the Mediterranean and Aegean. Emphasis will be placed on investigating major changes in social organization, cultural contact and exchange, technology and economy. Key developments covered will include the interaction between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the emergence of Upper Palaeolithic art, Neolithic megalithic constructions, the emergence and spread of agriculture, the impact of metallurgy, Iron Age ‘Celtic’ developments, and the expansion and influence of the Roman Empire. This course will provide a useful foundation for students interested in archaeology, history, ethnic history, art history and classics.

Zooarchaeology

Animal remains are often some of the most frequently encountered material remains recovered from archaeological sites and therefore provide crucial information relating to subsistence strategies, animal husbandry patterns, paleoenvironments and a wide range of other human behaviors.  This course provides an introduction to the main elements of Zooarchaeological research and will focus on the recovery, identification and contextual analysis of animal remains.  The course will provide both laboratory training as well as seminar discussions to evaluate the significance of Zooarchaeology within archaeological research.  Participants will have the opportunity to gain practical skills in faunal remains identification and analysis and to learn how this information can be applied to the comparative study of complex societies.

History of Anthropological Thought

This course provides a wide-ranging survey of the development of anthropological thought and the formation of the four-field discipline of Anthropology. Starting with early intellectual growth in Antiquity and the Middle Ages the course charts a path for students that will guide them through the dense and complex world of theory development in Anthropology from the time of Classical thought up through contemporary times. This class offers a critical foundation of knowledge for students majoring in Anthropology and/or undergraduate students planning to take more advanced seminar/writing courses in Anthropology, History, Sociology, and History and Philosophy of Science.

People, Places and Things

This course examines the use of recent theoretical perspectives that cross-cut many of the humanities and social sciences to explore the complex relationships that are created between people, landscapes and physical settings, and the use of objects and other forms of material culture. The course will survey key theoretical approaches to explore object agency, symbolism and ritual set within natural and built environments, and the roles that such places and things play within the composition of culture and long term mediation of social processes and memory. The course is diachronic in nature and examines a host of places and objects from around the world from prehistory to the present. A heavy emphasis will be placed on “interdisciplinary thought” with the goal of achieving a more nuanced and comparative understanding of the dynamic role that material culture and the natural and built environment have within the ever-evolving human condition.

Archaeological Geophysics 

This course introduces common methods of geophysical prospection being used within archaeology today. Classroom lectures and field surveys off campus at local historic sites provide students a unique hands-on approach to understanding and using geophysical instrumentation, collecting data, and analysis of datasets. Classroom lectures are provided on: (1) integration of geophysics as a tool within broader research programs, (II) background theory on the methods and their use in field research (fluxgate gradiometery, earth resistance, GPR, magnetic susceptibility, electrical conductivity), and (III) opportunity to process and interpret geophysics datasets.